The Number Mysteries

Marcus du Sautoy is currently a Research Fellow at the Royal Society and has been named by the Independent on Sunday as one of the UK's leading scientists; he is also a member of Dept of Pure Mathematics at Cambridge and a fellow of All Souls, Oxford. He writes for The Times and The Guardian, presents Mind Games on BBC4, was chosen as one of Esquire's 100 most influential men under 40, and gave the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures in 2006. He is the author of 'The Music of the Primes' and 'Finding Moonshine'

'Marcus du Sautoy, Oxford university maths professor and holder of the Simonyi chair for the public understanding of science...digs up the unusual places where maths lurks in the real world...it's a hard task making the world of maths accessible and intriguing to the general public...Du Sautoy manages it well...covering everything from internet credit-card security to the maths behind making the roundest football, he builds a persuasive case for how relevant these mathematical mysteries are to our everyday lives' Sunday Times Praise for 'Finding Moonshine': 'If you don't experience a thrill of foreboding as du Sautoy ventures into this twilit territory, nothing in maths will be for you. Even if the thought of sitting down to a quintic equation makes you want to cry, it would still be hard to resist Moonshine's cocktail of anecdote, swashbuckling potted history and haphazard self-revelation. The moments of autobiographical intimacy bring the book to life...a joy.' Daily Telegraph 'Mesmerising...articulate, fluent, funny and personable, [du Sautoy] is also absolutely passionate about mathematics, with a burning desire to make the rest of us as excited as he is about its problems, its patterns and its beauty. He captures for us with brilliant vividness the excitement of the pursuit of a solution to a difficult problem.' Lisa Jardine, Sunday Times